17 December 2013

Of
the seven deadly sins, envy may not be the wickedest, but it is the
most embarrassing. To be possessed by envy is to admit a humiliating
personal inadequacy: We do not envy others those attainments that we
think we too might achieve, but those we despair of ever possessing.
Wrath, greed, pride, lust — all assume a certain self-possession. Sloth
and gluttony are practically standard issue in times of plenty such as
these. Wrath and pride are the sins of great (but not good) men. Envy is
the affliction of the insignificant. It is the small man’s sin.

Which brings us to Robert Reich, who, having practically made a cult of envy, has taken to abusing the well-off for their acts of charity. Professor Reich, a ward of the taxpayers of
California (at $246,199.84 per annum) and a federal ward before that, is
persistently unhappy about how other people use their money, and he
scoffs that America’s rich philanthropists are phony and self-serving,
investing too much in opera and ballet and fancy colleges, and too
little in feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. He particularly
resents the fact that our tax code encourages such giving, with
deductions that reduced federal revenue by some $39 billion last year —
federal revenue that could have gone toward employing men such as Robert
Reich.

This calls to mind Edmund Spenser’s description of Envy
personified: “He hated all good works and virtuous deeds / And him no
less, that any like did use / And who with gracious bread the hungry
feeds / His alms for want of faith he doth accuse.”

Professor
Reich being Professor Reich, you can guess how his argument unfolds. (If
you have read one Robert Reich column, which is one too many, you have
read them all.) He writes: “As the tax year draws to a close, the
charitable tax deduction beckons. America’s wealthy are its largest
beneficiaries. According to the Congressional Budget Office,
$33 billion of last year’s $39 billion in total charitable deductions
went to the richest 20 percent of Americans, of whom the richest 1
percent reaped the lion’s share.” It goes without saying that he makes
no attempt to compare the apportionment of charitable tax deductions
with charitable donations — that would only complicate things and invite
an unpleasant encounter with reality.

For a sense of perspective, consider that that $39 billion in tax deductions was associated with$316 billion in charitable donations.
Our innumerate class warriors dismiss philanthropy as a complicated tax
dodge for the rich, but in fact tax deductions amount to about 12
percent of total charitable donations, meaning that our wily robber
barons have figured out a way of beating the taxman by . . . giving away
far more money than they receive in related tax benefits. Even if
Professor Reich got his way on tax rates and they went up to 90 percent
at the top, you still don’t come out ahead by giving away money.

Beyond
stealing altar offerings from the almighty god of revenue, our
philanthropists offend Professor Reich’s sensibilities in another way:
They don’t give to the sort of enterprises he wants them to give to. “A
large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s
wealthy are for donations to culture palaces — operas, art museums,
symphonies, and theaters — where they spend their leisure time
hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors. . . . These aren’t really
charities as most people understand the term. They’re often investments
in the life-styles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to
have as well. Increasingly, being rich in America means not having to
come across anyone who’s not.” Unsurprisingly, Progressive America’s
favorite non-economist-who-plays-an-economist-on-TV does not bother to
document what he means by “a large share.”

Giving to art-and-culture
organizations amounted to just over $14 billion in 2012,
or about 4.5 percent of charitable contributions, far less than was
given to health, human-services, or public-benefit organizations. There
are a fair number of single organizations that run into the billions per
year, including YMCA ($6.24 billion), Goodwill Industries ($5 billion),
Catholic Charities ($4.4 billion), and the Red Cross ($3.12 billion).

Professor
Reich is writing in a very old tradition, one that is especially
familiar to Catholics: Why spend money on beauty when there is
necessity? Protestants have a long and rich tradition of abusing the
Catholic Church for its supposed wealth — why not auction off the
Sistine Chapel and give the money to the poor? The egalitarian liberal’s
equivalent: Why incentivize donations to Princeton when we could be
spending that money on food stamps? I like to imagine Robert Reich at
the Nativity: “Gold? Frankincense? Myrrh? Try something useful!”

Why should we, things being as awful as they are, encourage such frivolities as take place at Lincoln Center?

A
question, though: If spending on art, music, and culture is
self-serving when private citizens do it, what is it when government
does it? Essential, necessary, crucial — of course. The New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs by itself spends some $150 million a year
on precisely that sort of thing. The state spends dozens of millions
more. A good deal of that money goes to subsidizing theater, including
big-ticket theater. In my role as a theater critic, I am constantly
surprised by how many shows selling tickets for north of $100 are
publicly subsidized. It isn’t huge money — without public support for
the Manhattan Theater Club, that $120 ticket to see Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place
(excellent, be sorry if you missed it) might have been $125 instead.
But it adds up: a few dozen millions from the state, a hundred million
from the city, a billion and a half from Washington.

Try cutting a piece of that and you’ll hear howls about how vital
every farthing spent in the service of culture is. Unless you’re David
Koch, in which case it’s “Thanks for giving the New York ballet a nice
place to perform, now please die.” I wonder how many New York
balletomanes know that the David Koch in the David Koch Theater is that
David Koch. Perhaps it is the urge to put one’s name on things that so
offends Professor Reich and his colleagues at the Richard and Rhoda
Goldman School of Public Policy.

Or he might contend that government spending on arts and culture does go to important causes, such as bringing us interviews with Robert Reich on NPR and subsidizing screenings of hisdopey documentary film.

At
its root, this is not about tax revenue or the woeful state of the
federal cash-flow statement. This is about envy and its cousin,
covetousness. Progressives know that they will always enjoy
disproportionate influence in the public sector, but they are vexed that
there exist large streams of money that are, for the moment, utterly
outside their control. They convince others — and themselves, probably —
that they are driven by compassion, but they are in fact driven by
envy: Note Barack Obama’s insistence that tax rates on the wealthy
should be raised even if doing so produced no fiscal benefit — it’s just
“the right thing to do,” he said, necessary “for purposes of fairness.”
The battle hymn of “Nobody needs that much money!” has a silent harmony
line: “And I get to decide how much is enough!”

Prayerful people
bargaining with God over lottery numbers no doubt imagine that they
would do some worthy things with that money, on top of buying a Ferrari.
Progressives imagine all the wonderful things they could do with other
people’s money, and no doubt some of them are well-intentioned. But envy
poisons whatever good intentions they have, which is how men such as
Professor Reich come to write resentful indictments of people who are,
remember, giving away billions of dollars of their own money. He’d
prefer their money be given away by him, or by bureaucracies under the
tutelage of men such as himself. As the moral philosopher Hannibal
Lecter put it: “He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to
covet? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we
see every day.”

Megan McArdle once observed that in our public
discourse, “very rich” is defined as “just above the level a top-notch
journalist in a two-earner couple could be expected to pull down.” There
is no envy like the envy of a $250,000 man in a world of $250 million
men, as Robert Duvall’s crusty newspaper editor explains to a
financially frustrated employee in The Paper: “The people we
cover — we move in their world, but it is their world. We don’t get the
money — never have, never will.” But being in that world, they learn to
covet, which helps explain why Professor Reich’s old boss, Bill Clinton,
ended up with $50-odd million in the bank after a lifetime of public
service.

Americans gave away $316 billion in 2012, and will give
away as much or more this year, and Professor Reich composed 731 words
to explain the problems related to that. He should have composed two
words, especially relevant to this season: